The present invention is generally directed to systems and methods utilized to pay customer bills with third party billers, or directed payees. Specifically, the present invention is directed to systems and methods that avoid the typical payment channels and instead utilize the payees own payment platform.
There are numerous bill payment programs and plans, ranging from recurring payment plans linked to a financial account of a customer to online bill pay offered by most major banking institutions. Such bill pay systems are often focused at the unbanked segment of the population, and may provide a more efficient and inexpensive method of paying bills than prior art methods such as money orders or Western Union.
Many bill pay systems maintained and operated by payment processors require a customer to enter information regarding the account to be paid and to provide funding to the payment processor. The payment processor generally pays the bills identified by the customer through traditional methods—typically a value transfer. Such value transfer is typically accomplished through the use of a billing aggregator. Billing aggregators generally gather billing records from one company and posts the records to another billing system. Typically, if a customer uses bill payment processor “A” to pay bills to its electric company, the transaction is typically as follows: (i) customer pays money (currency) to payment processor “A”; (ii) payment processor “A” pays a billing aggregator (e.g., RPS, Checkfree); (iii) billing aggregator pays the electric company.
While this process is often useful for the clearinghouse capabilities offered by the billing aggregator, it involves an extra value transfer and all of its accompanying fees, costs, charges, and risks.
Accordingly, a system that obviates billing aggregators is desirable. However, in order to avoid the connections provided by most billing aggregators, some link to the payment platform of the payee (or provider of goods or services that is to be paid) must be maintained and/or accessed. More and more providers are moving towards maintaining their own payment platform—typically accessed by customers via the interne—as an additional means of accepting payment. Accordingly, a system that can avoid using a billing aggregator by instead directly accessing a provider or payee's payment platform is desirable.
In addition to the drawbacks of billing aggregators, most bill pay systems require a customer to fund the bill pay account in a particular manner—typically with cash at the time of account set-up or payment. Given the ubiquitous nature of stored value cards, a bill pay system that utilizes stored value cards as payment options is desirable. However, it is understood that many providers or payees may not accept stored value—particularly stored value that is related to a closed-loop system. Accordingly, it is desirable to maintain systems and methods of accepting typically closed-loop stored value from a customer, but providing open-loop stored value (e.g., a prepaid Visa debit card number) to the provider or payee.